How Do I Manage My Passwords?

December 26, 2013

Around a decade back there were just a few sites and hardly anyone had more than 5 or 10 passwords to remember. One for their internet connection, their computer password, their email account password and 1-2 passwords for something I can’t even think of (I didn’t even know what a computer was a decade back). Remembering 4-5 passwords isn’t a difficult task. But now after emergence of Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, web hosts, hundreds of apps which require to create an account we have a lot more passwords to remember. I have over 400 accounts and remembering all their passwords isn’t an easy task. It’s a different thing if you use a common password for all your accounts, but then that isn’t safe. Someone hacks your Gmail account and he gains access to your Facebook, Twitter, blog automatically. So having a common password isn’t something I’ll recommend you. Most of the sites these days have their own set of rules to choose a password. Some of them require your password to be less than 10 characters, some of them force you to use numbers and symbols, some others want you to use multiple cases where as the others don’t want you to use symbols. So even if you generate a common password which satisfies the first three conditions, it cant satisfy the last one. You obviously can’t have a password both with and without symbols in it! So how do I actually go about managing my passwords?

Methods Which Didn’t Work :/

1. Writing down my passwords in a book. I misplaced one of my books containing a few of my passwords only to spend sleepless nights later. None of my accounts got hacked but that feeling itself is killer!

2. Using a diary with a lock! I’m sure you haven’t seen a diary like this. I actually got one as a birthday present a couple of years back with fairies all around. I didn’t know what to do with it so I used it for saving my passwords until my dog caught hold of it and broke the lock! You can guess the “security level” the diary provided!

3. An excel sheet! This was another stupid attempt I made which didn’t work. I created an excel sheet with all my passwords in it. And I forgot to password lock it. Even if it was password locked I don’t think a spreadsheet provides encryption I can boast about!

4. LastPass ~ After trying all that I came across LastPass which I thought will help me manager all my passwords easily. But a couple of months after I joined it there were reports of their site being hacked and data being leaked. I’m not sure if those hackers got access to my log in ids and passwords because I changed all of them, but then this fool-proof method made me a fool!

Now time for something that worked!

After having tried all those hilarious methods of saving passwords excluding the last one, I started looking for something which could help me manage all my passwords with ease without I spending sleepless nights with dreams of my accounts getting hacked! Whenever I looked for a password manager, I mostly stumbled upon online password managers but after that LastPass incident I couldn’t convince myself to try them. I wanted an offline password manager. I found one. KeePass!

KeePass ~ The Best Password Manager

KeePass is an open-source and undoubtedly the best password manager I’ve come across. May be that’s because I find my laptop more secure and since it allows me to store passwords offline, KeePass has become my favorite!

Why I Love KeePass?

It’s simple to use.

It’s fast.

You can create unlimited databases.

You can create categories, give them different icons.

It isn’t online.

It works on all platforms including Android.

It offers encryption like no other password manager.

And it’s open-source. I don’t have to spend a penny to use it!

It’s just 4MB large and gets you started in no time. It hardly takes any time to install and setup and then you are good to go. I definitely love KeePass for all the above reasons but I like it more because it keeps my password synchronized on all my devices.

No it doesn’t provide a feature to do that but there are several apps available on their page which can read KeePass databases and with an additional app like Google Drive you can keep your database on your computer and smartphone synchronized! Sounds like a lot of thing but it took me just minutes to setup. Well I was about to write an article on it but then I stumbled upon this three year old article on AndroidPolice. Saved my time!